“The snoops view you as an enemy of the state, unless you can prove differently, whereas the reality is that The Strange World of NSA Mind Control is the true foe of the liberty of people and a free nation.” ~Sartre
The Bill of Rights is not an accumulation of mere words that have become expendable, when the government finds them inconvenient. The Fourth Amendment is especially an example of a promise of protecting natural rights, long ignored and often violated. While much of court precedents involve policing powers, these decisions have profound application to NSA metadata mining. With the first anniversary of the Edward Snowden disclosures, no government official or agency can continue to deny the existence of the total surveillance state.
The NSA’s “General Warrants”: How the Founding Fathers Fought an 18th Century Version of the President’s Illegal Domestic Spying, provides an indispensible example of the fundamental conflict that always exists, when magistrates envision their duty as the maintenance of government supremacy over the inherent autonomy of individuals.
“It is “familiar history,” the U.S. Supreme Court noted in Payton v. New York, that “indiscriminate searches and seizures conducted under the authority of ‘general warrants’ were the immediate evils that motivated the framing and adoption of the Fourth Amendment.” When James Madison drafted the Fourth Amendment, he relied heavily on the Massachusetts Constitution, which forbade warrants that did not specify the “persons or objects of search, arrest, or seizure.”
Since the post World War II era, the radical shift from the remnants of the former Republic, into a global authority, where the meaning of the law has no correlation to the intent of original constitutional conviction, is undeniable. What was enemy signals interception became complete domestic scrutiny and monitoring. Lost for all practical legal purposes was The Central Meaning of the Fourth Amendment. Tracey Maclin provides a historic account and judicial context on how the constitution was perverted. Continue reading
I know, I know. It’s a Russian thing. When we’re about to do something stupid, we like to catalog the full extent of our stupidity for future reference.– Susan Ivanova, Babylon 5